How to be a Husband by Tim Dowling Read Free Book Online Page B

look terribly convincing, this sham marriage we’ve hastily arranged just so we can stay together forever.
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    I am prone to nightmares in which I find myself back at school or still in college, suddenly facing the prospect of sitting a final exam for a class I signed up for but never attended, taught by a teacher who would not recognize me (they may be dreams, but they’re based on true stories). At the point where the full consequences of my unpreparedness are about to be made plain I wake up and discover, to my immense relief, that I am middle-aged, and therefore closer to the sweet release of death than I am to tenth-grade chemistry.
    Waking on my wedding day, the reverse happens: I had been dreaming of mundane things, only to open my eyes and find myself in a foreign country where I’m about to get married. My life’s greatest test to date is scheduled for eleven thirty a.m., and I could not be less ready.
    I have borrowed a dark blue suit from my friend Bill, without trying it on first. He’s much taller than me; the trousers, it transpires, are three or four inches too long. Only the night before, my friend Jennifer had had to come round and staplenew hems into place. I need to step into the trousers very gingerly in the morning to avoid undoing her work.
    My memory of the next four or five hours is dangerously unreliable, and full of blank spots. It’s a good thing there are pictures. My imminent wife and I spent the night apart—she at her mother’s, me in the flat. I don’t remember meeting up the next morning outside the Chelsea register office at all; only the part where I watched her write out a check to cover the cost of the ceremony in a back office. I remember stepping from the office into a venue area—a big sitting room, really—crammed with about forty people I either knew or was related to, and trying not to catch anyone’s eye. I recall a bit of the rigorously bland language in the vow I recited: “I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediment why I, Robert Timothy Dowling, may not be joined in matrimony to . . .” I was basically petitioning to get married because I could not think of a solid legal reason to stop myself.
    A lunch follows the ceremony, followed by a big party in a pub and a night in a posh hotel. The first real test of our marriage doesn’t come until the next morning, when we have to get married again. After getting to bed at about four a.m., I am up and waiting for a taxi at seven thirty. My Catholic wedding is at ten, and by prior arrangement I am attending the preceding mass with my family. My wife is to arrive later for the ceremony. I am badly hungover, nervous and shaking. I am in no fit state to get married and, had I not already been married, I might have got cold feet. But I didn’t. Reader, I married her, again. I married the shit out of her.
    The next day, we fly to Naples. It seems odd to leave behindsuch a large collection of normally far-flung friends, relatives, and in-laws—an assemblage that will never recur—while they’re all having fun in London, but we need to go on honeymoon. It’s booked, and more important, I can only apply for indefinite leave to remain from outside the UK. We are leaving the country so I can get back in.
    Our priority in Naples is a visit to the British vice-consul, the only man in the area with the authority to approve my reentry into the UK, excepting, I suppose, the consul. We turn up with our marriage certificate, some required paperwork, and a selection of specially taken Polaroid wedding photos, and we are prepared to hold hands if it will help. The vice-consul waves away our photos, signs our papers, and gives us tea. He regards our case as a welcome distraction, he says, from his regular duties, which seem to revolve largely around repatriating penniless students. The business is completed in under an hour.